by Thomas King
“Pastries?”
“Not for everyone,” I say, “but we could give them to a family, as we’re going to the train.”
“Pastries.”
I know it sounds a little condescending, but it’s something we could do, and maybe a slice of cake or a piece of chocolate would brighten their day.
Every major city in the world has at least one great place for coffee. Café El Escorial in Havana, Spella Caffe in Portland, Capital Espresso in Toronto. And every major city in the world has at least one famous coffee house. Café Brasilero in Montevideo, Caffè Florian in Venice, Le Procope in Paris, Caffe Reggio in Manhattan.
Sometimes, the famous places, cafés where history and ambience are the draw, don’t serve the best coffee, and sometimes, the places that serve great coffee, cafés where the quality of the beans and the roast bring people in, are housed in storefronts with all the character and atmosphere of a chicken coop.
“Okay,” says Mimi, sorting through the material she collected at the station in Prague, “we’ve got the New York Café. Opened in 1894 and was a place where writers and artists hung out. Very ornate and opulent.”
“Sounds good.”
“However, in 2006 it was linked to the New York Palace, a luxury hotel, and now it gets a lot of upscale tourist traffic.”
“Pass.”
“Then there’s the Café Astoria in the Hotel Astoria.”
“Isn’t that the place you wanted to spend the night? Nazis, Russians, Stalinist chic?”
“I did.”
“Also pass.”
“Which leaves Central Café,” says Mimi. “Famous meeting place for writers such as . . .” Mimi turns the brochure over. “Frigyes Karinthy and . . . Lorinc Szabo. Evidently, the place was a hotbed for art and politics. It says the Communists closed most of the coffee houses, but that after the fall of the dictatorship in 1989, Central Café was one of the first to be reopened.”
“Let’s go there.”
“And it’s near the university.” Mimi puts the brochures back in her bag. “Fancy yourself a dissident writer, do you?”
“Just hope the coffee is good.”
STAVROS AND HIS SON dropped us off at a three-way intersection, each street no wider than an alley.
“Maletiani,” said Stavros.
“This is it?”
“Yes.” Talos handed me a small card with a phone number on it. “Maletiani. When you are done buying, call and we come.”
The building in front of us had a sign on it that said “KOINOTHTA MAΛETIANON.” I was pretty sure that koinothta was the word for “community,” and the second word probably was the village itself, Maletiani.
“Well,” said Mimi, “here we are.”
The building was closed. Nothing to suggest that it had ever been open or was planning to open anytime soon.
Mimi peered in through the glass door. “It feels like a government office of some sort.”
I had assumed that there would be a shop or a store in Maletiani, some place you could step into and begin a conversation about a lost relative and a prodigal grandson. But in a village as small as Maletiani, there were just houses.
“Maybe it’s only open so many days a week. Or maybe it’s only open one day a week.”
Mimi walked around to a window, but it was too high off the ground.
“You know, like the old West with the travelling judges on a circuit and the dentists who worked out of a covered wagon.”
Villages set in the hills tend to be hilly, and Maletiani didn’t disappoint. We wandered up one street that rose rapidly and then slalomed back down the next. Up and down we went, weaving our way through the village.
“We could take a photo of a nice-looking house and pretend that that was where your grandfather was born and raised.”
On the third run, we turned a corner and ran into a cart drawn by a donkey. The cart was filled with various vegetables, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and onions, and standing around the cart was a group of men and women, all older than me.
“All right,” said Mimi. “Show me what you got.”
THE UNNERVING PART of arriving in a new city is that you have no idea as to the layout of the place, and after the first five minutes in the taxi, neither Mimi nor I have any idea where we are. We had said Central Café, showed the driver the address, but we could be on our way to Bratislava for all we knew.
“American?” asks the cab driver.
“Blackfoot,” says Mimi.
“Canadian.”
Mimi elbows me in the ribs. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“He’s not going to know who the Blackfoot are.”
“And he’s certainly not going to know if we don’t tell him.”
“Movies,” says the cab driver. “Bruce Willis. Bang, bang. Tom Cruise. Bang, bang.”
Given its history, I expect that Central Café will be in a sketchy part of Budapest, one of those down-the-next-dark-alley establishments, a small, smoke-filled hollow frequented by poets, spies, and the secret police. So it is a minor disappointment to find the café sitting on the edge of an upscale shopping mall. The building looks old enough, but when it comes to coffee shops, ambience is everything, and Central Café looks as though it has walked away from its colourful history and gone shopping for Zegna and Ferragamo.
“This is it?”
“Very famous,” says the cab driver. “Number one for tourists.”
Central Café is in a stone building with arched windows and doors. Inside are tall ceilings, hardwood floors, and red leather. Everything polished and sparkling. We find a seat at the front where we can see the display filled with Hungarian pastries. I try, but I can’t imagine spending a day in such affluent surroundings, writing poetry, drinking espresso, eating tortes, working on political intrigues with friends.
“Not exactly bohemian,” I tell Mimi. “You want a pastry?”
“I want to go to the bathroom.” Mimi stands up. “If the waiter comes, order me a cappuccino and something chocolate.”
There are photographs on the walls. Mostly men in suits that are fifty years out of date. I guess that these are the artists who frequented the café in its heyday, but they could just as well be plumbers and truck drivers. On the back wall is a large portrait of a young man staring out at the customers. There’s something disturbing about the painting. One eye is in shadow, and the man’s mouth is drawn as though he is anticipating something unpleasant. Or cruel.
When the waiter arrives, I ask him about the portrait.
“Ah,” says the waiter, in perfect English, “this is Endre Ady. Do you know his work?”
I have to admit that I don’t.
“He was a poet and a journalist. Very famous.”
I check the menu one more time, but I know what I want.
The waiter takes out his pen. “American?”
AS SOON AS THE people standing around the vegetable cart saw us, they stopped talking, and they stopped moving, as though someone had hit pause on the remote. I smiled and waded in with my exceptional Greek.
“Kalimera.”
The man at the town hall had copied the page in the ledger that showed my grandfather’s birth along with the names of his parents and his siblings. I pulled the page out of my pocket and held it out.
“My pappou,” I said, pointing to the entry.
One of the older women came around the side of the cart and looked at the paper.
“Pappou?”
“Nai.” I pointed to my grandfather’s name. “Maletiani.”
The woman pointed to the ground at her feet. “Pappou? Maletiani?”
“Nai. Milate agglika?”
This was greeted with head shaking and a chorus of “okhi.” I pointed to my grandfather’s name again. “Pappou. Thomas. Athanasios. And then I pointed to my grandfather’s brother’s name on the Xerox. “Georgios. Adeltos.”
This sparked a lively conversation among the villagers at the cart, with the women taking the lead an
d the men chiming in every so often.
Mimi pressed against me. “What are they saying?”
“No idea.”
“What happened to ‘I speak Greek’?”
“Different dialect.”
“Right. So, do they know your grandfather?”
“Not sure.”
And just as quickly as the conversation began, it stopped, and the villagers went back to sorting through the vegetables. Mimi and I stood by the cart for a moment and pretended to admire the produce, and then we quietly slipped away.
At the top of the street, we stopped and looked back down.
“This is how life used to be,” said Mimi. “Simple. Uncomplicated.”
“Life has never been simple.”
“You know,” said Mimi, “it wouldn’t hurt if you tried to look at things positively every now and then.”
“Quiet,” I said. “The place is quiet.”
“There,” said Mimi. “Was that so hard?”
Not that the quiet was all that encouraging. While there were no cars and trucks rumbling up and down the streets, no emergency vehicles with their sirens, no loud music, neither were there any sounds of children playing or the voices of neighbours talking.
As we walked up and down the streets of Maletiani, the only sound was the wind.
“How about this?” Mimi stopped in front of a house with a grape arbour in the yard. “This look like your grandfather’s kind of place?”
Tomorrow the car service would take us back to Athens and the airport for our flight home. This was the one day I had to see where my grandfather was born, to close one of the unfinished circles of my life.
“Or maybe that one.”
I shook my head. “Not the way it works.”
“You’re a journalist,” said Mimi. “So, pick a house and make up a story about it.”
Mimi had a point. One of these houses was the house in which my grandfather was born and raised. The records at Kymi town hall had confirmed that. How many houses were there in the village? What was wrong with picking one and laying claim to it? The odds of being right were infinitely better than buying a lottery ticket or putting quarters into a slot machine at the casinos in Niagara.
“You stand in front of a house you like,” said Mimi, “and I’ll take a picture.”
I was about to explain why this was a bad idea when an old man came out of one of the houses and hurried towards us.
“Herete.”
Followed by a flood of Greek that I couldn’t follow.
The man was probably in his eighties. Maybe older. Short, powerful, the kind of man my grandfather had been in the handful of photos I had of him.
“Mavrias.” He waved a hand at an old stone house across the road, its door chained, its windows boarded. A wire fence and an iron gate guarding the property. “Mavrias.”
It took me a moment. “Mavrias?” I said, pointing at the deserted house.
“Nei, nei,” said the man. “Georgios Mavrias.”
“Mavrias,” I said. “Pou einai?”
“Ah, ah,” said the man, laying his face against his hands in a sleeping gesture. “Nekros.”
“Nekros?” said Mimi. “Is that like necropathy? As in . . . dead?”
“Athina,” said the man. “Nekros. Athina.”
“Athena?” Mimi raised her voice, in case volume was going to lead to understanding. “The goddess of wisdom and war?”
“I think he means Athens. They’re either dead or they went to Athens.”
“Nei, nei.” The old man hurried to the iron gate and held it open. “Mavrias,” he said again, with emphasis. “Mavrias.”
The house was a square two-storey. It sat by itself on a piece of land with a view of the valley to the west. There was a large tree in the yard that had probably been there when my grandfather was a child. To the side of the house, on the second floor, was a balcony that looked out at the church in the distance.
The old man stood by the fence and gestured me forward with his hands.
“Look, Bird,” she said, “he’s telling you that this is yours.”
“Maybe.”
“The family pile,” said Mimi. “Your grandfather’s house. Come on, Bird, that’s got to make you feel good.”
“Sure.”
I stood in front of the house and looked out across the land. There were clouds in the distance that weren’t going to reach us anytime soon. The air was warm and filled with the smell of dry grass and olive trees.
Mimi reached down, picked up a grey and white stone and handed it to me. “Thomas Blackbird Mavrias,” she said. “Lord of the manor.”
BY THE TIME MIMI returns to the table, her cappuccino and chocolate cake are waiting for her. I’ve already tried a bite of her cake, and this is the first thing she notices.
“You ate my cake.”
“You always eat mine.”
“That’s different.” Mimi sips her coffee. “So, how is it?”
“It’s okay.”
“Are you depressed again?”
“Just tired.”
“It’s the refugees, isn’t it?” says Mimi. “You don’t like seeing children in distress.”
I can’t imagine that anyone likes to see anyone in distress, but as soon as I think this, I remind myself that I’m wrong. For the most part, no one much cares what happens to other people, just so long as it doesn’t happen to them. We have the capacity for compassion. We simply don’t practise it to any degree.
It’s more an ideal that we hang on a wall where it’s easy to see and almost impossible to reach.
“The cake is good,” says Mimi. “You should get your own piece.”
“Not hungry.”
“Then I could have a bite of yours.”
“We should head back to the station.” I check the clock on the wall. “You want to try to find the university and that copper strip?”
“What about the refugees?”
I don’t see the rage until it’s on me. “Maybe we can talk Two-Cent Jim into donating a couple pallets of bottled water.”
“That’s not nice.”
“Or better yet, we could pack a couple of the families into our luggage and take them home with us.”
“Bird . . .”
“You know, like souvenirs. Nothing Canada loves better than a bunch of refugees.”
“Stop it!”
“Or we could just shoot them and be done with it.”
Mimi sits back and stares out across the room. I cradle my espresso and listen to each breath I take.
Slow. Deliberate. Slow. Deliberate.
“The portrait,” I say, after I get myself under control, “is of Endre Ady. He was a poet. And a journalist.”
Mimi has tears in her eyes. She pushes her cake to me. “Here,” she says.
We sit there in silence until the waiter brings the bill. The two of us, in the heart of Budapest, in the middle of a summer afternoon. There is probably something I could say, something I should say, but in the end, we simply leave the café and catch a cab back to the station.
VII
The train back to Prague is an uneasy truce, a silent passage. I sit and look out the window, watch the land rush by, hum show tunes in my head.
“The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha.
“If I Loved You” from Carousel.
“Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific.
This is dangerous and not recommended. Musicals tend to make me emotional, and there’s no telling when the humming will get out of hand.
Mimi passes the time reading an English-language book she bought at the station. The cover suggests that it’s a gathering of porn stars in a hospital. It’s not what Mimi normally reads, but then she’ll read anything with text.
It’s my fault. I understand that. It was probably the “just shoot them” remark. Which was supposed to have been satiric. At least, that’s what I tell myself, now that the fury has faded.
But I’m more incl
ined to hold the refugees responsible.
If they hadn’t been trying to escape the devastations of war, they wouldn’t have been in Keleti station. And if we hadn’t gone to Budapest to see the sights, we wouldn’t have seen the children. And if we hadn’t seen the children, Mimi wouldn’t be angry with me.
The logic is somewhat flawed and self-serving, so I don’t repeat it out loud.
By the time we pass through Bratislava, I’ve run out of show tunes.
“Good book?” I ask, to try to break the impasse.
Silence.
Out the window, the land is flat, and I can see that there is no pardon on the horizon.
So we’re in Prague.
We pull into the station before midnight and take a cab back to our hotel. The air conditioner is still going, the room is still hot, the spiders are still on the ceiling, the tourists are still walking back and forth across the Charles Bridge.
I go directly to the bathroom, and when I come back out, Mimi is already in bed, wrapped up in a fortress of blankets and pillows.
I sit in the chair and watch Czech television shows with the mute button engaged. That’s the beauty of television and life in general. You don’t need sound to understand what’s happening.
I’m still in the chair the next morning. I check my watch. The breakfast room has just opened. I could wake her, but I leave Mimi sleeping and head downstairs. She’ll find me soon enough. After Budapest, it’s probably best if we begin the day in public and on neutral ground.
The table in the corner is free. I sit with my back to the wall and do a slow review of my life and what I’ve accomplished.
Photojournalist.
That’s about it.
The Indian expert. My great claim to fame. The man who covered all the major contemporary events. Alcatraz, 1969. Trail of Broken Treaties, 1972. Wounded Knee, 1973. The Seminoles and Native gaming controversy, 1979. Oka, 1990. Ipperwash, 1995. Idle No More, 2012. Elsipogtog fracking protest, 2014. Dakota Access Pipeline protest, 2017.
If it had feathers and a drum, I was there.
For over forty years, I took the pictures, wrote the stories. And then I walked away.